This bill was printed in 1934, and shows the largest notional value ever printed on a United States note. The bill was never circulated among the public, according to Gilles Bransbourg, an adjunct curator at the American Numismatic Society who curated the exhibit. Rather, it was used for transactions involving the Treasury and the Federal Reserve banks, back in the days when you couldn’t just push a button on a keyboard to transfer large sums of money.

And sorry, guys, it’s no longer usable as legal tender anyway.

If you think that’s a large bill, get a hold of this one:

American Numismatic Society

That is a 100,000,000,000,000 — or one hundred trillion — dollar note from Zimbabwe, printed in 2008. It has 14 zeroes, the largest number of zeroes ever to appear on a bank note, Mr. Bransbourg said. It was worth about 70 cents in American dollars at the time.
Zimbabwe effectively halted its hyperinflation epidemic by switching to American currency.

While I’ve compared a huge Wilson bill from 1934 to an even more gigantic Zimbabwean one from 2008, the United States did not actually struggle with hyperinflation during the Great Depression. The bigger bugaboo at the time was actually deflation.

That said, the country did experiment with a lot of weird currencies during the Great Depression, thanks to major debt and liquidity crises.

Here is my favorite:

American Numismatic Society

At one point when the banks were closed for 10 days, this shell was used in California as a sort of alternative promissory note. Neat, huh?

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